zhmud leonid - the origin of science in classical antiquity

8/9/2019 ZHMUD Leonid - The Origin of Science in Classical Antiquity

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Leonid ZhmudThe Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity


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Peripatoi

Philologisch-historische Studienzum Aristotelismus

Herausgegeben von

Wolfgang Kullmann,Robert W. Sharples, Jürgen Wiesner

Band 19

2006Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York


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kainà dè zhtoñnte~ ëpipónw~ eûr2sousi

Isoc. Antid ., 83.

Preface

Several sections of this book (3.1–2, 4.2–3, 5.1-2, and 7.6) include revised

Leonid Zhmud

The Origin of theHistory of Science

in Classical Antiquity

Translated from the Russian by

Alexander Chernoglazov

2006Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York


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ISSN: 1862-1465ISBN-13: 978-3-11-017966-8

ISBN-10: 3-11-017966-0

Bibliographic Information published by Die Deutsche BibliothekDie Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;

detailed bibliographic data is available in theInternet .

Copyright 2006 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of thisbook may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronical or mechanical, includ-ing photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permis-

sion in writing from the publisher.

Printed in GermanyTypesetting: Selignow Verlagsservice, Berlin

Printing and binding: Hubert & Co., GöttingenCover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

∞ Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelinesof the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability


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To the memory of my wife Irina

(1965–2002 )


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kainà dè zhtoñnte~ ëpipónw~ eûr2sousi

Isoc. Antid ., 83.

Preface

When writing a book on the Pythagorean school, I noticed that, although Aris-totle’s student Eudemus of Rhodes was regularly used as a source for Greekscience, there was no scholarly treatment of him as the first historian of science.Indeed, as my further research showed, the whole area of ancient Greek histori-ography of science remained almost entirely unexplored. This prompted me towork first on Eudemus, and then on his predecessors, colleagues, and fol-lowers. The Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington (1995–1996); Maison desSciences de l’Homme, Paris (1998); Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton(1998–1999); Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, Bonn (2000, 2004); Well-come Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, London (2000–2001); and Wis-senschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2002–2003, 2005) have found my studies worthy of support. Without them this book would hardly have been written. The Alex-ander von Humboldt-Foundation and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin gener-ously sponsored the translation of this book into English. I express my deepgratitude to all these institutions.

Alexander Gavrilov, Elena Ermolaeva, Dmitri Panchenko, and Alexander Verlinsky have read the Russian version of the book, published in 2002 in St.Petersburg; their valuable suggestions have improved the text in many places. Iam grateful to Gertrud Grünkorn for her offer to publish the English version of my book with the Walter de Gruyter Press. In preparing the new edition I haveupdated the bibliography and written an additional chapter, tracing the fate of the historiography of science after Eudemus.

István Bodnár, Carl Huffman, Charles Kahn, Paul Keyser, Colin G. King,and Henry Mendell have read and commented on separate chapters of themanuscript; their criticism has made it possible to eliminate many inaccuraciesand to make essential improvements to the text. Lydia Goehr, John Hyman,Maria Michela Sassi, David Sider, and Heinrich von Staden have all been ex-tremely helpful. I would particularly like to thank Geoffrey Lloyd, who hasread a whole draft of the book and sent me his very helpful comments. The edi-tors of the Peripatoi series, Wolfgang Kullmann, Robert Sharples, and JürgenWiesner, have also read the whole manuscript and provided their expert com-

ments, which saved me from many mistakes. Those that still remain are myown responsibility.I want also to express my special gratitude to Mitch Cohen at the Wissen-

schaftskolleg zu Berlin for his meticulous reading of my book in manuscriptand for having greatly improved its English.


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PrefaceviiiSeveral sections of this book (3.1–2, 4.2–3, 5.1-2, and 7.6) include revised

versions of my earlier papers:1) Plato as “architect of science”, Phronesis 43 (1998) 211–244;2) Eudemus’ history of mathematics, Eudemus of Rhodes, ed. by I. Bodnár,

W. W. Fortenbaugh, New Brunswick 2002, 263–306 (Rutgers UniversityStudies in Classical Humanities, Vol. 11);

3) Historiographical project of the Lyceum: The peripatetic history of science, philosophy, and medicine, Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezep-tion, Vol. 13 (2003) 113–130;

4) “Saving the phenomena” between Eudoxus and Eudemus, Homo Sapiensund Homo Faber. Festschrift für J. Mittelstraß, ed. by G. Wolters, M. Carrier,Berlin 2005, 17-24.

I am grateful to the respective publishers and editors for their kind per-mission to use these papers.

St. Petersburg, January 2006 Leonid Zhmud


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Contents

Introduction: Greek science and its historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11. The historiography of science in the 16th –18thcenturies . . . . . 12. The historiography of science in Antiquity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103. Greek notions of science and progress .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. 16

Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers: Greek heurematography andthe origin of the history of science .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 23

1. Prõtoi eûretaí : gods, heroes, men .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232. Heurematography and the ‘Greek miracle’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293. Inventors and imitators. Greece and the Orient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

Chapter 2: Science as técnh: theory and history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451. The invention of técnh . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . 452. The theory of the origin of medicine .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 543. Archytas and Isocrates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 604. Why is mathematics useful? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 715. From ‘progress’ to ‘perfection’ .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Chapter 3: Science in the Platonic Academy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 821. Plato as architect of mathematical sciences? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 822. TheCatalogue of geometersabout mathematicians of Plato’s

time . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . 893. Mathematics at the Academy .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104. Plato on science and scientific directorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1045. The theory and history of science in the Academy . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Chapter 4: The historiographical project of the Lyceum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1171. Greek science in the late fourth century BC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1172. Aristotelian theory of science and the Peripatetic historiogra-

phical project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1223. History in the Lyceum .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1334. The aims of the historiographical project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1405. Eudemus’ history of science .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1476. Doxography: between systematics and history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Chapter 5: The history of geometry . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 1661. Eudemus of Rhodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1662. The History of Geometry: on a quest for new evidence . . . . . . 1693. The Catalogue of geometers: from Eudemus to Proclus . . . . . 179

4. Early Greek geometry according to Eudemus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1915. Teleological progressivism .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

0


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ContentsxChapter 6: The history of arithmetic and the origin of number . . . . . . . . . . . 214

1. The fragment of Eudemus’ History of Arithmetic. . . . . . . . . . . . 2142. Aristoxenus:On Arithmetic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2183. The origin of number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

Chapter 7: The history of astronomy .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . . 2281. Eudemus’ History of Astronomy and its readers .. . . . . . . . . . . . 2282. Thales and Anaximander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2383. Physical and mathematical astronomies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2504. Anaxagoras. The Pythagoreans .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2555. Oenopides of Chios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2606. From Meton to Eudoxus. ‘Saving the phenomena’ . . . . . . . . . . 267

Chapter 8: Historiography of science after Eudemus: a brief outline . . . . . 2771. The decline of the historiography of science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2772. Biography and doxography .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2933. Frominventio to translatio artium: scheme and reality . . . . . . 297

Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312General index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321


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Introduction

Greek science and its historiography

1. The historiography of science in the 16th –18th centuries

Ancient Greek science has been studied for such a long time that the history of these studies themselves deserves an enquiry of its own. Like philology, whichemerged in Europe as classical philology, the history of science was born as thehistory of ancient science. It is the theories and discoveries of Greek scientiststhat provided the material on which the methods of the history of science wereworked out over the centuries. This process started much earlier and continuedfar longer than is commonly thought. Interest in the history of science appearedfirst in classical Antiquity and has experienced more than one rise and declinesince then. The first rise came in the late fourth century BC, when the earliestworks on the history of science were written. Then, after a long period of dwindling interest, medieval Arabic culture again focused attention on the his-tory of Greek science, with later peaks of interest occurring during the Renais-sance and the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Themodern histori-ography of science, which takes contemporary science as its main referencepoint and has gradually mastered new methods of source criticism, emerged inthe late 18thto early 19thcenturies. This period coincided with a new infatuationwith classical Antiquity, so that, ever since, the history of Greek science has re-mained a steadily growing field of study, combining classical philology withthe history of science.

This is the history of studies in ancient science summarized in one para-graph. Those who seek a detailed history of the subject will be disappointed:none has ever been written. Generally speaking, historians of science, unlikeclassical philologists or historians of philosophy, have as yet shown no particu-lar interest in the origin and the early stages of their discipline. In the few caseswhere these problems have appeared to draw attention, their examinationproved superficially selective and seldom reached further back than the 18thcentury.1 Apart from works on the ancient historiography of medicine2 and

1 Loria, G.Guida allo studio della storia delle matematiche, Milan 1946; Struik, D.J.Historiography of mathematics from Proklos to Cantor, NTM Schriftenreihe für Ge-schichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 17 (1980) 1–22; Vogel, K.L’historiographie mathématique avant Montucla, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichteder Mathematik , Vol. 2, Stuttgart 1988, 556–562; Schneider, I. Hintergrund undFormen der Mathematikgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts, AIHS 42 (1992) 64–75;Laudan, R. Histories of the sciences and their uses: A review to 1913, HS31 (1993)1–33; Vitrac, B. Mythes (et realités) dans l’histoire des mathématiques grecques an-


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography2Arabic historiography of science, the field remains almost untouched. The Re-naissance historiography of science has only recently come to be studied.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing surprising about this. The object of thehistory of science is, in the first place, science itself. Historiography, whether rightfully or not, has always remained in the background. For a historian of science, the works of Euclid, Ptolemy, or Newton are of greater importancethan the historico-scientific literature contemporary to them. To be sure, some-times this literature may prove to be a valuable source, for example, when theoriginal scientific writings have been lost. The first histories of science werewritten by the Peripatetic Eudemus of Rhodes even before Euclid’s Elementssummed up the first three centuries of Greek mathematics. Whereas from Eu-clid we learnwhat was discovered during this period, it is Eudemus who tells uswho made these discoveries and when, also adding some material not includedin the Elements. Similarly, the history of early Greek astronomy is knownmainly from Eudemus and from the doxographical work of Theophrastus, hiscolleague in the Lyceum. This is what actually accounts for the pragmatic in-terest shown by historians of Greek science in the surviving fragments of Eude-mus and other Peripatetics. Yet outside Antiquity and after the invention of printing in particular, the purely pragmatic approach to the historiography of science is hardly justified. Those who study the science of the 16th –18th cen-turies turn, as a rule, to primary sources, not to the historico-scientific literatureof the epoch, which was mostly antiquarian in character and did not aim tocover the latest discoveries. As a result, the interest in this literature as a sourceis still smaller than that enjoyed by the historico-scientific tradition of An-tiquity.

Our subject is the ancient historiography of science. ‘Pre-modern’ histori-ography of science interests us only insofar as it reveals a marked continuitywith the ancient tradition, both on the formal and the thematic level. If the his-tory of science revived in Europe as the history of Greek science, it was becausethe science of the 15th –17thcenturies was itself oriented toward assimilating theclassical heritage. In this period, the interests of scientists and historians of

ciennes, L’Europe mathématique: histoires, mythes, identités, ed. by C. Goldstein etal., Paris 1996, 31–51.

2 Smith, W. D. Notes on ancient medical historiography, BHM 63 (1989) 73–109;Staden, H. von. Galen as historian,Galeno: Obra, pensamiento e influencia, ed. byJ. A. López Férez, Madrid 1991, 205–222; Pigeaud, J. La médicine et ses origins,Canadian Bulletin of Medical History9 (1992) 219–240. The collection Ancient his-tories of medicine. Essays in medical doxography and historiography in classical Antiquity, ed. by Ph. J. van der Eijk, Leiden 1999, constitutes the first attempt at sys-tematic approach to this subject. For the earlier literature, see Heischkel, E. DieMedizinhistoriographie im XVIII Jh., Janus 35 (1931) 67–105, 125–151; eadem. Die Medizingeschichtsschreibung von ihren Anfängen bis zum Beginn des 16. Jh.s, Ber-lin 1938; eadem. Die Geschichte der Medizingeschichtsschreibung, Einführung indie Medizinhistorik , ed. by W. Artelt, Stuttgart 1949, 202–237.


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1. The historiography of science in the 16th–18th centuries 3

science converged to a much greater extent than they did, for example, in An-tiquity, and this gave the historiography of science an important additional im-petus. Such a convergence of interests is by no means common. As opposed tothe history of philosophy – which is still an integral part of philosophy3 – or thehistory of medicine – which remained an integral part of medicine up to the 19thcentury – the history of science usually focuses on tasks quite different fromthose of science itself. For most physicians of the late 18thcentury, Hippocratesand Galen remained topical,4 just as the problems posed by Plato, Aristotle andDescartes remain topical for the greater part of modern Western philosophy.But the problems that occupied Archimedes, Ptolemy, or Copernicus are veryfar from those of modern science.5 The history of science becomes reallynecessary for scientists only when, for whatever reason, the scientific or, in amore general sense, the cultural tradition, which normally ensures the trans-mission of knowledge from generation to generation, is disrupted. It is whenforeign science is being assimilated that the main question of the history of science – ‘who discovered what?’ – arises in the process of scientific investi-gation itself. The absence of clear answers to this question can hinder research,for instance, by forcing scientists to spend time and energy proving what has al-ready been proven or refuting what has already been refuted.

One such period was the 8th –10th centuries, when Greek science was appro-priated by the Arabic-speaking world and became an integral part of Arabicscience. Unlike medieval Europe and, in many ways, unlike Byzantium, Arabicculture borrowed, along with Greek science, both the ancient historico-scien-tific tradition6 and its major methodological approaches to science.7 It would

3 That is why its earlier stages are studied much more fully. See e.g. Braun, L. Histoirede l’histoire de la philosophie, Paris 1973; Del Torre, M.A. Le origini moderne dellastoriografia filosofica, Florence 1976; Piaia, G. “Vestigia philosophorum”: il Medio-evo e la storiografia filosofica, Rimini 1983; Models of the history of philosophy, ed.by G. Santinello, C.W. T. Blackwell, Vol. 1–3, Dordrecht 1993.

4 The classical history of medicine of the time, Sprengel, K.Versuch einer pragma-tischen Geschichte der Medizin, T. 1–5, Halle 1792–1803, still regarded doctors’familiarity with ancient and Arabic medicine, which the author knew first-hand, asbeing of practical use.

5 On the ongoing ‘dehistorisation’ of mathematics since the 18th century, see Sieg-mund-Schultze, R. Über das Interesse der Mathematiker an der Geschichte ihrer Wissenschaft, Amphora. Festschrift für H. Wussing, ed. by S. Demidov et al., Basel1992, 705–736.

6 On the Arabic historiography of science and medicine, see Meyerhof, M. Sultan Sa-ladin’s physician on the transmission of Greek medicine to the Arabs, BHM 18(1945) 169–178; Rosenthal, F. Al-Asturlabi and as-Samaw’al on scientific progress,Osiris 9 (1945) 555–564; idem. Ishaq b. Hunayn Ta’rih al-attiba’,Oriens 7 (1954)55–80; idem. An ancient commentary on the Hippocratic Oath, BHM 30 (1956)52–87; Plessner, M. M. Der Astronom und Historiker Ibn Sa‘id al-Andalusi undseine Geschichte der Wissenschaften, RSO31 (1956) 235–257; Hau, F.R. Die medi-zinische Geschichtsschreibung im islamischen Mittelalter,Clio medica 18 (1983);


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography4hardly suffice to say that Muslim scientists had a lively interest in their Greekpredecessors. They held them in the highest esteem, tried to find every last bitof information on them, made annotated catalogues of their works, translatedthe extant biographies of eminent scientists and physicians and compiled newones.8 Later, on the basis of all of this, a historiography of Arabic science andmedicine arose, which in turn influenced both the Byzantine and the Westerntraditions.

In many ways, the situation in Europe in the 15th –17thcenturies parallels theArabic assimilation of Greek science. To return to ancient science after somany centuries; to edit and translate Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes, Ptolemy,Diophantus, and Pappus; to understand ‘who was who’ in ancient science – allthis urgently demanded at least a general historical picture of Greek mathemat-ics and astronomy, which presented its achievements chronologically.9 The ab-sence of such a picture hampered, if it did not foreclose, progress to new dis-coveries. During the Renaissance, the historiography of science therefore re-mained as inseparable from the classical heritage as science itself;10 the MiddleAges, apart from the Arabs, were usually ignored.

69–80; Brentjes, S. Historiographie der Mathematik im islamischen Mittelalter, AIHS 42 (1992) 27–63; Gutas, D. The ‘Alexandria to Baghdad’ complex of nar-ratives, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale10 (1999) 155–193.See also below, 8.3.

7 On the methodology of science in the works of Arabic thinkers, see Alfarabi. Über den Ursprung der Wissenschaften( De ortu scientiarum), ed. by C. Baeumker,Münster 1916; Wiedemann, E. Auszüge aus Ibn Sina’s Teile der philosophischenWissenschaften (mathematische Wissenschaften), Aufsätze zur arabischen Wissen-schaftsgeschichte, Vol. 1, Hildesheim 1970, 146–154; idem. Definitionen verschie-dener Wissenschaften und über diese verfaßte Werke, ibid., Vol.2, 431–462; Maróth,M. Das System der Wissenschaften bei Ibn Sina, Avicenna / Ibn Sina, ed. byB. Brentjes, Vol. 2, Halle a. S. 1980, 27–34; Gutas, D. Paul the Persian on the clas-sification of the parts of Aristotle’s philosophy: A milestone between Alexandria andBaghdad, Islam 60 (1983) 231–267; Hein, C. Definition und Einteilung der Philo-sophie. Von der spätantiken Einleitungsliteratur zur arabischen Enzyklopädie,Frankfurt 1985; Daiber, H. Qosta ibn Luqa (9.Jh.) über die Einteilung der Wissen-schaften, ZGAIW 6 (1990) 92–129.

8 Wiedemann, E. Einige Biographien von griechischen Gelehrten nach Qifti (1905), Aufsätze zur arabischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 86–96, cf. 62–77;The Fihrist of al-Nadim, transl. by B. Dodge, Vol. 2, New York 1970, 634ff., 673; Pinault, J.R. Hippocratic lives and legends, Leiden 1992.

9 Interestingly, until Commandino’s edition (1572) Euclid was generally confusedwith Euclid of Megara, who lived hundred of years earlier.

10 Nutton, V. ‘Prisci dissectionum professores’: Greek texts and Renaissance anatom-ists, The uses of Greek and Latin, ed. by A. C. Dionisotti et al., London 1988,111–126; idem. Greek science in the sixteenth-century Renaissance, Renaissanceand revolution, ed. by J.V. Field, Cambridge 1993, 15–28 (with an extensive bibli-ography); Grafton, A. From apotheosis to analysis: Some late Renaissance historiesof classical astronomy, History and the disciplines, ed. by D. R. Kelley, Rochester


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography6vanced astronomical hypotheses to ‘save the appearances’. Coming as it did inthe midst of animated discussions on the status of astronomical hypotheses, thisdemand was echoed by the leading astronomers of the time, in particular Kep-ler, who sought confirmation of his views in the texts of the ancients while de-monstrating his superiority to them.15

The first Renaissance history of medicine, De medicina et medicisby G.Tortelli, followed the way paved long before him by Celsus and Pliny.16 Start-ing with De antiquitate medicinae by his contemporary Bartolotti, the histori-ography of medicine made increasing use of Galen’s material as well as of hisnotions of medicine’s past. Some biographies of scientists and physicians hadalready been known via Greek and Arabic sources and their Latin trans-lations;17 during the Renaissance this genre was revived. The first generalhistory of mathematics, written by B. Baldi in 1580s, was a collection of 202 mathematicians’ biographies, from Thales to Clavius, patterned after Dio-genes Laertius and using a wealth of Greek, Latin and modern sources.18 An-tiquity occupies about two thirds of this voluminous work.

The works of the humanists did not so much investigate the origin and de-velopment of arts and sciences as illustrate them with biographies of scientistsand doctors, supplementing the latter with bibliographical and doxographicalevidence. Chronological outlines briefly describing the achievements of emi-nent scientists from Antiquity to the present were a fairly popular genre.19Among the important tasks of this antiquarian and genealogical history was theenhancement of the status of a given science by demonstrating its antiquity.Thus the majority of early histories of chemistry considered alchemy’s claims

15 Jardine, N.The birth of history and philosophy of science. Kepler ’s “ A defence of Tycho against Ursus”, Cambridge 1984; Jardine, N., Segonds, A. A challenge to thereader: Ramus on Astrologia without Hypotheses,The influence of Petrus Ramus,ed. by M. Feingold et al., Basel 2001, 248–266.

16 Giovanni Tortelli on medicine and phycisians; Gian Giacomo Bartolotti on the an-tiquity of medicine: Two histories of medicine of the XVth century, transl. by D.M.Schullian, L. Belloni, Milan 1954.

17 Musitelli, S. Da Parmenide a Galeno. Tradizioni classiche e interpretazioni medi-evali nelle biografie dei grandi medici antichi, Rome 1985 ( A. A. Lincei, Vol. 28,fasc. 4); Pinault,op. cit.

18 Rose, P. L.The Italian Renaissance of mathematics, Geneva 1975, 243ff. A part of Baldi’s learned work was published posthumously: Baldi, B.Cronica de’ matema-tici overo Epitome dell’ istoria delle vite loro, Urbino 1707. For biographies of themedieval and Renaissance mathematicians with a commentary and ample bibli-ography, see Baldi, B. Le vite de’ matematici, ed. by E. Nenci, Milan 1998.

19 Champier, S. De medicinae claris scriptoribus in quinque partibus tractatus, Lyon1506; Brunfels,O.Catalogus illustrium medicorum sive de primis medicinae scrip-toribus, Strasbourg 1530; Gaurico, L. Oratio de inventoribus, utilitate et laudibus as-tronomiae,C. Ptolemaei Centum sententiae, ed. G. Trapezuntius, Rome 1540; Cla-vius, C. Inventores mathematicarum disciplinarum (1574),Opera mathematica, I,Mainz 1611.


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to antiquity and refutations of them.20 Hence, the ideas of the development of individual sciences from their legendary ‘founding fathers’ to the author’s dayand of the transmission of knowledge from one culture to another are charac-teristic, in various forms, of the historico-scientific literature of the Renais-sance and distinguish it from the medieval Latin genealogies of sciences andarts.21

In the 17thcentury, the number and volume of works on the history of scienceincreases, the range of problems widens, and the subject matter becomes morevaried.22 Voluminous works by such polymaths as Voss combine prodigiouslearning with uncritical retelling of old legends. It is only natural that, in theperiod when Hippocrates and Archimedes were topical as never before, a largenumber of historico-scientific works were directly related to Antiquity.23 Evenworks of a more general character devoted the greater part of their attention tothis period.24 Daniel Le Clerc’s fundamental History of Medicine, the first to gobeyond the biographies of famous doctors and annotated lists of their works,finishes at Galen, so that it can rightfully be considered a history of ancientmedicine.25 In the historiography of medicine, this kind of proportion in the se-

20 Duval, R. De veritate et antiquitate artis chemicae, Paris 1561. On the continuationof this discussion in the 17th –18th centuries, see Weyer, J.Chemiegeschichtsschrei-bung von Wiegleb (1790) bis Partington(1970), Hildesheim 1974, 17f.

21 Rose,op. cit ., 258.22 See e.g. Moderus, S. J. Disputatio de mathematicarum disciplinarum origine, Seu primis inventoribus etc., Helmstedt 1605; Biancani, G. De natura mathematicarum

scientiarum tractatio, atque clarorum mathematicorum chronologia, Bologna 1615;Deusing, A. De astronomiae origine, ejusdemque ad nostram usque aetatem pro-gressu, Hardwijk 1640; Voss, G. J. De universae mathesios natura et constitutioneliber, cui subjungitur chronologia mathematicorum, Amsterdam 1650; Glanvill, J. Plus ultra: or the progress of knowledge since the days of Aristotle, London 1668;Borrichius, O. De ortu et progressu chemiae dissertatio, Copenhagen 1668; De-chales, C.F. M.Cursus seu mundus mathematicus. Pars I. Tractatus prooemialis, de progressu matheseos et illustribus mathematicis, T. 1, Leiden 1690, 1–108; Cassini,D. De l’origine et du progrès de l’astronomie (1693), Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences 8 (1730) 1–52.

23 Biancani, G. Aristotelis loca mathematica …atque Clarorum mathematicorumchronologia, Bologna 1615; Molther, J. Problema Deliacum, de cubi duplicatione,Frankfurt 1619; Beverwyick, J. van. Idea medicinae veterum, Leiden 1637; Nottna-gel, C. De originibus astronomiae, Wittenberg 1650; Schmidt, J. A. Archytam Ta-rentinum dissertatione historica-mathematica, Jena 1683; idem. Archimedem ma-thematicorum principem dissertatione historico-mathematica, Jena 1683; Valentini,M. B. Medicina nov-antiqua, h.e. cursus artis medicae e fontibus Hippocratis,Frankfurt 1698.

24 Riccioli, G.B. Chronicon duplex astronomorum, astrologorum, cosmographorum etpolyhistorum, Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens,Bologna 1651; Boulliau, I. Astronomia Philolaica … Historia, ortus et progressusastronomiae in prolegomenis describitur , Paris 1645.

25 Le Clerc, D. Histoire de la médicine, Geneva 1696. In the subsequent editions, Le


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography8lection of material shows up quite frequently until the end of the 18th century.Thus, of the 33 chapters of Ackermann’s history of medicine, 26 deal with An-tiquity, 3 with the Arabs, 3 with the school of Salerno, and only one considers“the revival of Galen’s and Hippocrates’ medicine in Europe”.26

The general history of a science, mathematics for example, was normally di-vided into the following periods: the mathematics of the Jews, starting withantediluvian times; the mathematics of the Egyptians and Babylonians, who re-ceived it from the Jews (an account of this was already based on Greeksources); the mathematics of the Greeks, who borrowed it from the Egyptiansand Babylonians; the mathematics of the Arabs, who inherited it from theGreeks; etc.27 As we have already noted, this perspective derives from earlyChristian writers and, in particular, from Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius,who tried, in the wake of such Jewish authors as Aristobulus, Philo, and es-pecially Josephus Flavius, to combine the Bible with the doctrines of ancientphilosophy.28 After an account of fabulous discoveries made by Seth, Abraham,or Moses, the historians finally passed on to Thales and the Greek tradition,where they could rely on more dependable sources and demonstrate not onlytheir learning, but their critical sense as well. With time, this perspective shiftsprogressively to the pagans, so that the biblical theme slowly but irrevocablydisappears from works on the history of science.29

Yet within the limits of ancient Greek tradition, too, a clear boundary be-tween mythologized and real history was lacking until the late 18thcentury. LeClerc, following the authority of Celsus and Galen, started his history with As-clepius, not with Hippocrates. The solid Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Medicine includes, along with the biographies of eminent doctors, ar-ticles on Asclepius and the centaur Chiron.30 Even such an authority on the his-tory of astronomy as Bailly still regarded Atlas, Zoroaster, and Uranus as thefirst astronomers.31 To be sure, much depended on individual preferences. Thus

Clerc, influenced by the critics, added a brief survey of the history of medicine untilthe 16th century.

26 Ackermann, J.C.G. Institutiones historiae medicinae, Nuremberg 1792.27 See e.g. Weidler, J. F. Historia astronomiae, sive de ortu et progressu astronomiae

liber singularis, Wittenberg 1741. Cf. above, 5 n.14.28 Worstbrock, F. J. Translatio artium. Über Herkunft und Entwicklung einer kulturhis-

torischen Theorie, ArKult 47 (1965) 1–22. Cf. below, 8.3.29 For growing criticism of the concept of prisca sapientia in the 18th-century histori-

ography of philosophy, see Blackwell, C.W. T. Thales Philosophus: The beginningof philosophy as a discipline, History and the disciplines, 61–82.

30 Eloy, N.F. J. Dictionnaire historique de la médicine ancienne et moderne, T. 1–4,Liège 1755.

31 Bailly, J.S. Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne depuis son origine jusqu’à l’établis-sement de l’École d’Alexandrie, Paris 1775, 4. Bailly’s curious idea of a source com-mon to all the astronomies of Antiquity, which he identified with Atlantis (Pasini, M. L’astronomie antédiluvienne: Storia della scienza e origini della civiltà in J.-S.Bailly,Studi settecenteschi 11–12 [1988–89] 197–235), is similar to the thesis of a


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Baldi (1589) opened his collection with Thales’ biography, Biancani (1615) de-cided not to mention Atlas, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Linus, etc., because they werelegendary figures impossible to date, while Montucla, even in the second edi-tion of his famous History of Mathematics (1799), could not get rid of Thoth asthe inventor of mathematics.

The 18thcentury, and its second half in particular, saw the rapid growth of lit-erature on the history of science, which numbered hundreds of solid volumes.32As science itself developed and became more specialized, the chapters onancient science in general treatises grew shorter, remaining, however, subjectmatter for most studies.33 Moreover, the number of special works on ancientscience grew at least as fast as that of writings based on the material of Euro-pean science alone.34 In the middle of the 18thcentury, a historian of mathemat-ics could still allow himself to restrict his work to the biographies of ancientscientists.35 Many writers continued to borrow from their Greek and Romanteachers not only evidence, but also the problems to be considered in the historyof science. Of still greater importance than these particular borrowings was theperspective itself, in which ancient science continued to be an integral part of science as such, remaining, in this sense,modern until at least the end of the18thcentury. Admittedly, the new type of historiography emerging at the thresh-old of the 19th century departs not from Greek science as such (the number of

well-known modern mathematician and historian of science who found the commonground of all the ancient mathematical traditions in the megalithic culture of thethird to second millennium BC (Waerden, B. L. van der.Geometry and algebra inancient civilizations, Berlin 1983).

32 The bibliography of works published from 1750 to 1800 on the history of mathe-matics alone includes about 200 titles (Cantor, M.Vorlesungen über die Geschichteder Mathematik , 2nd ed., Vol. 4, Leipzig 1901, 1–36).

33 See e.g. Heilbronner, J. C. Historia matheseos universae a mundo condito ad secu-lum p. C. n. XVI , Leipzig 1742; Weidler,op. cit .; idem. Bibliographia astronomica,Wittenberg 1755.

34 See e.g. Taelpo, S.Scholium mathematicum de geometriae origine, Aaboe 1700;Krebs, J. A. Dissertatio de originibus et antiquitatibus mathematicis, Jena 1727;Schulze, J.H. Historia medicinae a rerum initio ad annum urbis Romae DXXXV de-ducta, Leipzig 1728; Costard, G. A letter concerning the rise and progress of astron-omy amongst the antients, London 1746; idem. A further account of the rise and progress of astronomy amongst the antients, Oxford 1748; Fabricius, J.A. Elenchusmedicorum veterum, Bibliotheca graeca, Vol. 13, Hamburg 1746, 15–456; Neu-bronner, T. Historiae zodiaci, sectio prima: de inventoribus zodiaci, Göttingen 1754;Rogers, F. Dissertation on the knowledge of the ancients in astronomy and opticalinstruments, etc., London 1755; Goguet, A. J. de. De l’origine des loix, des arts et des sciences et de leurs progrès chez les anciens peuples, Vol. 1–3, Paris 1758; Rei-mer, N. T. Historia problematis de cubi duplicatione, Göttingen 1798.

35 Frobesius, J. N. Rudimenta biographiae mathematicae, T. 1–3, Helmstedt 1751– 1755. Though this series was interrupted by the author’s death, an impartial opinionon another book of his (Cantor,op. cit., Vol. 3, 499) shows that as a rule he hardlyever ventured beyond the Arabs.


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2. The historiography of science in Antiquity 11

sional notes scattered through the works on Greek astronomy and mathematics,not a single serious study has so far been written on it.

The reasons for this have already been suggested above. In Antiquity, thehistory of philosophy and the history of medicine were parts of philosophy andmedicine respectively. The problems posed by Plato and Hippocrates continuedto preoccupy philosophers and physicians until Greek philosophy and medicineceased to exist – hence the large number of writings on these subjects, some of which are still extant. The works directly related to the genre of the history of science were obviously much fewer in number, and very few of them survive infragments. Apart from them, at our disposal is the vast historico-scientificma-terial found in texts of different genres. Sundry as our sources are, they are cer-tainly not scarce and the evidence they bring shows many features in common.Though the historiography of science has not taken shape as a viable genre, theexistence of a historico-scientifictradition lasting from the classical perioduntil the last centuries of Antiquity is beyond doubt.

The Peripatetic works related to the history of science have been studiedsince the mid-19thcentury, with a focus on important testimonies they contain.Indeed, those who accept what Eudemus reports on Thales’ geometry, or Theo-phrastus on Anaximander’s astronomy, or Aristoxenus on Pythagoras’ arith-metic have quite a different view of the early Greek science from those whoreject this evidence. But the problem lies not so much in the assessment of sep-

arate fragments or individual authors as in the general approach to the Peripa-tetic historiography and its separate branches – doxography, the history of science, biography, etc. When reconstructing early Greek science, we are com-pelled to rely not on original sources, but on preserved historico-scientific evi-dence. As a result, our knowledge of it remains largely dependent on what wasregarded as science by the Peripatetics themselves, what, where, and in whatway they actually recorded, and what they neglected. The main conceptual ap-proaches to science, which predetermined for many centuries to come the com-prehension of this phenomenon in Antiquity and in the modern period, were es-

tablished in the fourth century BC. The comparison of Plato’s and Aristotle’sviews on science with modern conceptions of it has repeatedly proved to befruitful: the differences between them allow us to grasp the specificity of the ap-proach to science at different times, while the common features demonstratethe invariable nature of the phenomenon itself. It is important, however, to con-sider Plato’s and Aristotle’s positions in the context of the discordant opinionsthat existed in Antiquity, particularly the opinions of those who created thescience of the time first-hand.

A terminological remark is needed here. ‘Greek science’ in this book is

mostly confined to the exact sciences – geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, andharmonics, though in some contexts ‘science’ inevitably takes on a broader meaning. It is in the realm of the exact sciences that we find the closest possiblematch between ancient and modernconcepts of what science is as well as be-tween ancient and modern practice of scientific research. From the late fifth


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography12century BC on, the Greeks called the exact sciences by a special term maq2-mata and clearly distinguished them from the other intellectual pursuits, e.g.from physics, which they considered a part of philosophy. Unlike many other disciplines practiced by the Greeks, the exact sciences, joined in the fourth cen-tury BC by optics and mechanics, reached a truly scientific level in Antiquity.Their special status is confirmed by the fact that Greek historiography of science deals only withmathē mata; no other scientific discipline became a subject of a historical work, though histories of medicine were written. Thus,Greek historiography of science gives further justification for our rather re-strictive treatment of Greek science, which proceeds from the modern conceptsbut tries to pay due attention to the ancient ones.

The idea that the history of science allows us to trace the development of thehuman mind in a more reliable and spectacular way than any other kind of his-tory was repeatedly expressed in the age of Enlightenment.39 The 20th centuryprovided a corrective to this idea, giving it more precision: the progress of knowledge is best studied by tracing the growth of scientific knowledge.40 If science constitutes the best embodiment of the progress of knowledge, its his-toriography can be usefully considered an example of changing notions of knowledge, science, and progress, an integral part of intellectual and culturalhistory.

Thus, our research aims not only at collecting the most important evidencerelated to the origins of the historiography and methodology of science in An-tiquity, but also at answering the following questions. What was the socio-cul-tural context in which the history of science emerged? What do the main ap-proaches to science that found expression in the Peripatetic historiographystem from? Did classical Antiquity comprehend science as a special form of cognitive activity, and did this comprehension find its expression in the histori-ography of science? To what extent did the Greek historiography of scienceconstitute a historical analysis of the development of knowledge? Did it pro-ceed from philosophical premises, or remain purely descriptive? What was thefate of the historiography of science in the Hellenistic period? Why did it failwhere doxography succeeded in creating a stable and popular genre?Partly anticipating the analysis of the aforementioned problems, let us give ageneral overview of the tradition under study. Among its first landmarks wasthe trend in Greek thought that sought an answer to the popular question of ‘who discovered what’. By this trend, I mean the early heurematography of thesixth and fifth centuries BC, which treated most different elements of culture asdiscoveries (eûr2mata ) and showed interest in their first discoverers (prõtoi eûretaí ). At the beginning of the fourth century, it gave birth to a special genre,a sort of ‘catalogues of discoveries’, which survived until the very end of An-tiquity and later provided a model for Arabic and European writers.41

39 See e.g. Montucla, J.-E. Histoire des mathématiques, Vol. 1, Paris 1758, viii.40 Popper, K.R.The logic of scientific discovery, London 1959, 15.41 Kleingünther, A. PRWTOS EURETHS, Leipzig 1933; Wiedemann, E. Über Er-


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography14well aware of the youth of their culture in comparison with the Egyptian or Babylonian. Strengthened by Jewish and early Christian authors, who derivedGreek philosophy and science from the Pentateuch, this tendency not only pre-vailed in early modern historiography, but repeatedly came into the foregroundeven in the 19th –20th centuries.44 Taking this tendency into account will makethe analysis of the ancient evidence on the Oriental origins of sciences the moreinstructive.

In the second half of the fifth century, interest shifts gradually from individ-ual discoveries to the emergence of whole branches of knowledge and skills(técnai ) and, later, to the origin and development of culture as a whole. Thehistory of individualtécnai (for example, music and poetry) and philosophicaldoctrines on the origin of culture as the sum total of técnai were directly in-fluenced by heurematography. Still more important was the Sophistic theory of técnh: undertaken within its framework were the first attempts at analyzingscientific knowledge, such as the Hippocratic treatiseOn Ancient Medicine andArchytas’ workOn Mathematical Sciences, which considered scientific knowl-edge from both methodological and historical points of view.

In this period, the exact sciences (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and har-monics), though comprising a separate group among other técnai , had not yetbecome a model of science conceived of as ëpist2mh. The transition fromscience-técnh to science-ëpist2mh is largely associated with Plato, who cre-ated a theory of knowledge modeled on mathematics. According to Plato, thechief aim of ëpist2mh consists, not in serving society’s practical needs, butrather in knowledge as such, which is the worthiest occupation of a free man.The paradigmatic character of mathematics in Plato’s teaching left little placefor interest in its history, and most of Plato’s mathematical passages importantfor the history of science do not yield to simple interpretation. The numerousworks on exact sciences written by the Academics Speusippus, Xenocrates,Philip of Opus, etc., were also oriented toward the systematic account of scien-tific knowledge, rather than its history. At the same time, the Platonists showedan interest in tracing the effect of their teacher on the development of science:an Academic legend assigned to Plato the role of an ‘architect of science’ whoposed the main problems for mathematicians and defined the methods theyshould use.

The central part of this book is concerned with the first generation of Aris-totle’s pupils – Eudemus, Theophrastus, Aristoxenus, and Meno. Particularlyinteresting is the Peripatetic historiographical project, which aimed at the col-lection, systematization, and preliminary analysis of material related to the

44 Zhmud, L.Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Religion im frühen Pythagoreismus, Ber-lin 1997, 141ff., 202ff. This tendency is also visible in the recent discussions of theorigins of Greek culture: Bernal, M. Black Athena. The Afroasiatic roots of classicalcivilization, Vol.1–2, New Brunswick 1987–1991. Cf. Palter, R. Black Athena, Afro-Centrism, and the history of science, HS31 (1993) 227–267.


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2. The historiography of science in Antiquity 15

knowledge accumulated by the Greeks. The exploration of different kinds of knowledge was distributed among the Peripatetics in accordance with Aris-totle’s division of theoretical sciences into mathematics, physics, and theology.The methods of organizing, describing, and analyzing the material used withinthe framework of the project were different for each particular science. Particu-larly important for us are geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy, whose historiesEudemus considered in three special treatises. He placed the discoveries of Greek mathematicians in chronological sequence, starting with Thales andending with Eudoxus’ pupils, who were his own contemporaries. In many of itsaspects, the plan of Eudemus’ histories closely followed Aristotle’s favoriteidea of all arts and sciences as gradually approximating to perfection. His de-scription of scientific discoveries and methods was, however, based on the in-trinsic criteria of exact sciences rather than on philosophical premises.

Whereas Eudemus wrote of mathematicians and their discoveries, the doc-trines of physicists were treated in Theophrastus’ fundamental workOpinionsof the Natural Philosophers (Fusikõn dóxai ). Along with purely philosophi-cal problems, this treatise included mainly those we associate with naturalsciences (cosmology, physics, meteorology, physiology, etc.). Meno’s MedicalCollection (’Iatrik3 sunagwg2 ), dealing with medical theories of the fifthand fourth centuries, is linked to physical doxography and followed its methodsof organizing material. This work was concerned, not with discoveries in thefield of medicine, but with the theories of doctors and certain physicists on thecauses of diseases. Extant from Aristoxenus’ workOn Arithmetic is a singlefragment, which holds some interest for the history of science.

The historiography of science flourished only for a short period. With thedecline of the Lyceum in the third century BC, the development of the genreseems to have come to a standstill. Let us give a brief outline of some other genres. While the biographies of philosophers who also pursued science do oc-casionally include some evidence of their discoveries, biographies of ‘pure’scientists are practically unknown to us. Eratosthenes’ introduction to his

Geography includes a short historical overview of this science, and his Pla-tonicus is a literary version of the history of solving the problem of doublingthe cube. In hisTheory of Mathematical Sciences, Geminus (first century BC),who is traditionally considered an intermediary between Eudemus and lateAntiquity, paid principal attention to the methodology and philosophy of mathematics; his evidence on individual mathematicians lacks historical con-text. Pappus limited his voluminousCollectio (ca. 320 AD) to purely profes-sional tasks, but dealt with mathematical problems of the past as an anthol-ogist, not as a historian. A commentary on Euclid’s book I by Proclus (fifth

century AD), concerned as it was with mathematics as such and, to a smaller extent, its history, paid particular attention to the philosophy and the theologyof mathematics. Commentaries on Archimedes’ works by Eutocius (sixth cen-tury AD) include selected solutions to the famous geometrical problems of Antiquity.


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography16That the history of Hellenistic astronomy or mathematics, which could have

been of inestimable help to us, has never been written is, naturally, disappoint-ing. Our problems, however, did not concern the ancients. They were writingfor themselves, their disciples and contemporaries and could hardly imaginethat, of the total scientific literature, only one-tenth at best – if not one-fiftieth – would ultimately survive. With time, the growing awareness of science’s grad-ual decay spurred them to find and collect as much evidence of ancient scienceas possible. Since the first century AD, we find in many authors (Dercyllides,Theon of Smyrna, Anatolius, Porphyry, Proclus, etc.) lists of mathematiciansand astronomers with their discoveries, which were borrowed from Eudemus.The most extensive excerpts from Eudemus’ writings are found in Simplicius,the Neoplatonic commentator of the sixth century AD. This antiquarian trend,though helpful in salvaging what would otherwise have been irretrievably lost,did not bring about the revival of the history of science. Eudemus had to waitfor his followers for many hundreds of years.

3. Greek notions of science and progress

Eudemus’ History of Geometry and History of Astronomy show approaches toscience and to the selection of material rather close to serious studies of moderntimes.45 We do not find in them either legends and anecdotes, or a particular in-terest in the philosophy and theology of mathematics, or any inclination to thenumber mysticism characteristic of the Platonists, for example. They are con-cerned exclusively with scientific discoveries, with the development of newtheories and methods carried out within the framework of the professionalcommunity – mathemata mathematicis scribuntur . This trait of the Peripatetichistoriography of science is determined, ultimately, by the fact that the concep-tion of exact sciences formed in the Lyceum appeared to be very close to theviews of the mathematicians themselves. Since the dependence of histori-ography on the general notions of science is quite obvious, our book also con-siders such problems as the comprehension of science by scientists themselves,notions of boundaries between the exact sciences and natural philosophy, thephilosophy and methodology of science in the Academy and the Lyceum, theclassification of sciences, etc.

Outlining briefly this range of problems, let us touch upon the quite ani-mated discussion several decades ago of whether there was in classical Greecea notion of progress, and specifically of scientific progress, i.e., the idea of a

45 Eudemus understood the history of mathematics as a chain of discoveries that linksscientists to each other; cf. “Geschichte einer Wissenschaft ist meines Erachtens:wie ihre Lehren sind entdeckt, bekannt gemacht, bestimmt, berichtiget, dargetan,erläutert, angewandt worden.” (Kästner, A. G.Geschichte der Mathematik seit der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften bis an das Ende des 18.Jh.s, Vol.1, Göttingen1796, 13).


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3. Greek notions of science and progress 17

steady growth of knowledge. L. Edelstein demonstrated quite convincingly thatclassical Antiquity was not unaware of the idea of progress.46 One should be-ware, however, of taking an idea for an ideology. The popular 19th-century con-viction that in the future we will experienceconstant improvement in allspheres of human life is not to be found in Antiquity. The Greek notion of pro-gress was based preeminently, though not exclusively, on achievements inhuman knowledge and technology and hence proved much more limited thanthe 19th-century one.47 Even granting that some notions of progress current atthe time did include the idea of steady social and moral improvement, it was thereal achievements of the past and the present , not imaginary future prospects,that the Greeks were concerned with.48 Such a view, free of the ‘totality’ of the19th-century progressivist ideology and its eager anticipation of the future,49could comfortably coexist with a cyclic conception of history as, for example,in Aristotle or, later, in Jean Bodin.50

The limited or, rather, realistic character of the classical idea of progress isdue, first of all, to the difference in scale between the actual changes that tookplace in ancient Greece and in Western Europe respectively in the eighth– fourth centuries BC and in the 15th –19th centuries AD.51 We should keep inmind that the idea of progress made its first appearance only three hundredyears after the emergence of writing in Greece and less than one hundred yearsafter the origin of philosophy and science. In Europe, which had infinitely moreopportunities to ascertain the steady character of progress, this idea took rootonly after the French Revolution and the beginning of the Industrial Revol-ution. The limited character of ancient notions of progress underscores their scientific and, in a larger sense, cognitive component, which was not ques-tioned even by those who, on the whole, denied the existence of such notions inclassical Greece.52 Without the idea of the progressive growth of knowledge,the history of science would have hardly come about, and we have abundantevidence that the science of the past and the present was indeed described bythe Greeks in the terms of ‘progress’. In the fifth–fourth centuries BC, the idea

46 Edelstein, L.The idea of progress in classical Antiquity, Baltimore 1967.47 The notions of progress that reappeared in the 16th –17th centuries were chiefly based

on the same two components (Edelstein,op. cit., XIX n. 24; Koselleck, R. Fort-schritt,Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. by O. Brunner et al., Vol.2, Stuttgart 1975,392).

48 Thraede, K. Fortschritt, RLAC 7 (1965) 162; Meier, C. ‘Fortschritt’ in der Antike,Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 354.

49 The 20th century is characterized by a notable decline of the progressivist ideology:Nisbet, R. History of the idea of progress, New York 1980, 317ff.

50 Bodin, J. Method for the easy comprehension of history, New York 1945, 296ff.51 Meier, C. Ein antikes Äquivalent des Fortschrittsgedankens: das “Könnens-Be-

wusstsein” des 5.Jh.s v. Chr., HZ 226 (1978) 265–316.52 See Edelstein,op. cit., XX n. 27; Boer, W. den. Progress in the Greece of Thucy-

dides, MKNAdW 40.2 (1977).


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography18of progress was most often denoted by the word ëpídosi~; emerging later wasthe notion prokop2 , whose Latin analogue, progressus, has entered all mod-ern European languages.53

The idea of the progressive growth of knowledge (as well as many others)can well be expressed without being labeled with a specific term.54 The lack inGreek of a special term for science as a whole, as distinguished from its indi-vidual branches, is hardly crucial, either. Considering this fact, some scholarsstill argue that, in Antiquity, science in the modern sense of the word did notexist; others, that, in the early period at least, it was not distinguished from phil-osophy, both having been denoted by the same term,ëpist2mh. Even after their separation, which is believed to have taken place at the end of the classical peri-od or even later, philosophy continued to exert on science, including mathemat-ics, a much greater influence than it has in modern times, and (according to thisview) the differences between them went unnoticed by the Greeks.

An ancient language’s possession of a term denoting a field of creative ac-tivity as precisely as a modern term is hardly indispensable for the flourishingof this field. The Greeks did not have such terms for, say, art and literature. Theabsence of minimally elaborated terminology could, indeed, constitute a seri-ous obstacle for theanalysis of science, for its methodology and histori-ography. Yet the corresponding Greek terms for the well-ordered areas of knowledge appeared by the early fourth century at the latest;55 some of them areof much earlier date. In the second half of the fifth century, the educational cur-riculum in mathematics starts to include arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, andharmonics, which were termed maq2mata, branches of learning or areas of knowledge. In the late fifth to early fourth centuries this term came to meanmathematics as such. Thatëpist2mh could denote bothmathē mata and philos-ophy did not in the least identify the latter with mathematics.

The idea of the original syncretism of philosophy and science stems partlyfrom terminological confusion: physics, pursued, according to Aristotle, by thePresocratics, is indiscriminately termed bothnatural philosophy and naturalscience(s). But this confusion apart, such syncretism seems to me hardly plaus-ible because of the fundamental epistemological heterogeneity between philos-ophy and science, which in the final analysis can be reduced to the following.56

53 Edelstein,op. cit., 146; Thraede. Fortschritt, 141ff.; Meier. ‘Fortschritt’, 353.54 See e.g. Xenophanes (21B 18) and below, 1.3.55 gewmetría denoted geometry,@strología and@stronomía astronomy,logismó~

andlogistik2 arithmetic,ârmonik2 harmonics,mhcanik2 mechanics,öptik2 op-tics, ıatrik2 medicine, perì fúsew~ îstoría and fusiología natural philosophyor natural science.

56 See Fritz, K. von.Grundprobleme der Geschichte der antiken Wissenschaft , Berlin1971, 3ff.; Zaicev, A. The interrelationship of science and philosophy in Antiquity,Selected papers, ed. by N. Almazova, L. Zhmud, St. Petersburg 2002, 403f. (in Rus-sian). See also Zhmud, L. Die Beziehungen zwischen Philosophie und Wissenschaftin der Antike,Sudhoffs Archiv 78 (1994) 1–13.


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Scientific problems are sooner or later solved, if they are correctly posed, or withdrawn, if they are incorrectly posed, while genuinely philosophical prob-lems (not technical ones, like those of logic) have never received generally rec-ognized and irrefutable solutions. Since there are noa priorireasons to believethat the differences between philosophy and science change with time, we mayexpect them to have manifested themselves already at the earliest period of their synchronic development in ancient Greece. The development of mathe-matics and astronomy would, indeed, have been impossible had each of themnot singled out a special class of problems solvable by specific methods, i.e.,the axiomatico-deductive and the hypothetico-deductive method respectively.The achievements made by these sciences by the end of the fifth century showthat Greek scientists succeeded very early in isolating solvable problems anddeveloping adequate methods of dealing with them. Owing to this, the exactsciences, unlike the natural sciences, appeared to be independent of contempor-ary philosophy and were not perceived as a part of it.57 Astronomy, which orig-inally included a natural-philosophic component, was divided by the end of thefifth centuryde facto into cosmology, pursued by philosophers, and the math-ematical theory of the motions of heavenly bodies, which was the domain of trained specialists, maqhmatikoí . By the mid-fifth century, professionalisationbecomes quite pronounced: the mathematicians Hippocrates of Chios, Theodo-rus, Theaetetus, and the astronomers Oenopides, Meton, and Euctemon haveleft practically no traces of philosophical preoccupations. In the fourth century,the same can be said of Eudoxus’ numerous pupils; Eudoxus himself partici-pated in some Academic philosophical discussions, but left no works on thesesubjects. It is from this situation that Aristotle and his students proceeded,clearly formulating the difference betweenmathē mata and physics and consist-ently following the distinction in their works. Thus, even the first two centuriesof the development of philosophy and the exact sciences do not confirm theidea of their original syncretism. Neither is this idea proven by cases in whichscience and philosophy come to be joined in one person (Thales, Pythagoras,Archytas); modern history provides still more examples of such ‘personalunion’ (Pascal, Descartes, Leibnitz, Russell, etc.).

Presocratic natural philosophy did, in fact, study problems that we regard asrelated to physics, meteorology, or biology, while the medicine, botany, andzoology of the classical period stayed, in their turn, under the strong (thoughnot equally intense) influence of philosophical doctrines. Ancient physics re-mained part of philosophy to the very end – but that is precisely why it never

57 “I am convinced that the mathematical studies were autonomous, almost completelyso, while the philosophical debate, developing within its own tradition, frequentlydrew support and clarification from mathematical work … My view conforms towhat one may observe as the usual relation between mathematics and philosophythroughout history and especially recently.” (Knorr, W. R. Infinity and continuity:The interaction of mathematics and philosophy in Antiquity, Infinity and continuityin ancient and medieval thought , ed. by N. Kretzmann, Ithaca 1982, 112).


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Introduction: Greek science and its historiography20became a science. Nevertheless, in some fields of physics the Greeks succeededin isolating the particular problems that they were equipped to solve and raisedtheir research to the scientific level. As a rule, these were fields in which ex-perimentation proved comparatively simple and its results could be expressedin mathematical form: acoustics, optics, mechanics, statics, and hydrostatics.58Interestingly, the Greeks themselves related these fields not to physics (≈ phil-osophy), but tomathē mata (≈ science). In spite of the great number of dis-coveries and the wealth of accumulated material, other branches of naturalscience were not able to cross the boundary between pre-science and scienceuntil the modern epoch.

These remarks are not meant to deny the obvious fact that the ancient divi-sion of the cognitive and – in a larger sense – the cultural space is often remark-ably different from that accepted at present. In the classical period that particu-larly concerns us now, culture was usually understood as the sum total of pãsai técnai , while the word técnh itself could equally refer to mathematicsand poetry, medicine and pottery. The term ëpist2mh meant ‘firm knowledge’and was, hence, the closest to the notion of science in the modern sense. It wasfar, however, from embracing all kinds of scientific knowledge: according toPlato, it did not include Presocraticfusiología andmetewrología . The termëpist2mh, on the other hand, could denote not only astronomy, but also rhet-oric and even ironwork. According to Aristotle, theoretical sciences includedtheology (first philosophy), physics, and mathematics, and each of them couldbe indiscriminately referred to asëpist2mh or filosofía . Mathē mata, whichnumbered originally among técnai , in the fourth century came to includemechanics and optics (which passed in the modern period into the domain of physics) and were normally referred to as ëpist4mai . At the same time, thefour mathē mata entered the educational canon (ëgkúklio~ paideía , artes lib-erales), formed by the time of Hellenism, the other three parts of which – rhe-toric, grammar, and dialectic – were usually related to as técnai .59

There is no need to multiply these examples. It is obvious enough that theproblem cannot be reduced to a trivial terminological discrepancy, for instance,that in the early period astronomy bore the name of @strología , while the as-trologers of late Antiquity were called maqhmatikoí . What we face here is adifferent configuration of forms and results of creative and, in particular, cog-nitive activity deeply rooted in linguistic, cultural, and philosophical tradition.Having assimilated and modified this tradition, the Academics and later thePeripatetics failed to eliminate most of the contradictions inherent in it. As a re-sult, they often indiscriminately applied the same notion to different fields anddenoted the same field by different notions, and the fields themselves tended to

58 Lloyd, G. E.R. Early Greek science: Thales to Aristotle, London 1970, 30f., 139f.59 Fuchs, H. Enkyklios paideia, RLAC 5 (1962) 365–398; Hadot, I. Arts libéraux et

philosophie dans la pensée antique, Paris 1984. Hadot’s dating of this canon in theImperial age seems too late to me.


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overlap. But here, as in the case of the syncretism of philosophy and science,we should not exaggerate the importance of differences between ancient andmodern terminology and the classification of sciences, reducing the history of ideas to a superficially understood history of terms. The fact that in the epoch of Plato and Aristotle and much later, geometry and ironwork were both denotedby the word técnh, does not at all mean that the Greeks had difficulties distin-guishing between them. When necessary, language always finds means to dis-tinguish between things called by the same words: thus, ironwork was relatedto bánausoi técnai and geometry to logikaì técnai .

Comparing the ancient classification of arts and sciences (ëpist2mh – técnh, scientia – ars) with the modern one, we should bear in mind that thelatter took its final shape only during the 19th century, after more than three cen-turies of rapid scientific progress. Earlier it was the ancient, basically Aristote-lian, canon that everywhere remained in use. It is to this canon that we owemuch of the confusion, both in ancient and modern languages, about what be-longs to the ‘sciences’ and what to the ‘arts’. Reflections on the general cat-egory under which sciences ought to be considered, as well as on distinctionsbetween sciences, arts, and philosophy, fell considerably behind the progress of science itself and even tended to slow it down.

Zabarella, a Paduan philosopher of the 16th century, like most of his contem-poraries, based his classification on Aristotle: heading the list of sciences aremetaphysics, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Looking closer, however, atwhat at that time was regarded as related toartes and what toscientiae, we find,rather than a clearly defined hierarchy, a field of overlapping meanings.60 Scien-tia, in the largest sense of the word, comprised every kind of knowledge, in-cluding all practical fields, for example, medicine, which more properly shouldbe considered anars (though many physicians objected to this). Ars, on theother hand, could denote both the trades and theoretical philosophy. The analy-sis of more than a hundred university textbooks shows that this situation lastedthroughout the 16th –17th centuries.61 As a rule, theoretical philosophy was sub-divided into metaphysics, physics, and mathematics, so that the sciences of thequadrivium, regarded asscientiae, were part of philosophy andartes liberalesat the same time.

At the end of the 17th century, Newton revealed the fundamental laws of thenew physics in his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica.It took oneand a half centuries for the philosophia naturalisto transform itself into thescience of the 19th century. Throughout the whole of the 18th century, no one inEngland or in Europe managed to understand clearly to which of the two

60 Mikkeli, H. The foundation of an autonomous natural philosophy: Zabarella on theclassification of arts and sciences, Method and order in Renaissance philosophy of nature, ed. by D. A. Di Lischia, Aldershot 1997, 211–228.

61 Freedman, J.S. Classifications of philosophy, the sciences and the arts in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe,The Modern Schoolman 72 (1994) 37–65.


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Chapter 1

In search of the first discoverers:Greek heurematography and the origin of the history of science

1. Prõtoi eûretaí : gods, heroes, men

In theory, a study of the origins of the history of science in Antiquity shouldstart from the point where history and science first intersect, i.e., from a histori-cal overview of the scientific discoveries of the past. The problem, however, isthat such overviews are unknown before the second half of the fourth centuryBC, whereas the sporadic mentions that historians, for example Herodotus,make of scientific discoveries belong not so much to history as to heurema-tography. Yet this is not the only reason to regard heurematography, an utterlyunscientific genre with apparently little to offer history, as one of the fore-runners of the history of science. Heurematography raised the question of howknowledge and skill are originated and transmitted long before the history of science appeared, and various answers to this question are part of the latter’s

prehistory. Which is why the common origins of the interest in prō toi heuretaishared by both genres can best be traced in this ‘prehistoric’ material.

* * *

Interest in the past is inherent, to different extents, in all societies, includingpreliterate societies. The forms of its manifestation in ancient time are quitevarious, but generally they fit into the long worked out typology of folklore andearly literary genres. Among the folklore genres, cosmogonic and etiological

myths are to be mentioned first, then the heroic epic, which in many though notall cultures becomes the earliest literary genre. Another early literary genreworth noting is the historical chronicle, characteristic of the Chinese and, to alesser extent, the Jewish tradition. This list does not, of course, exhaust the var-iety of questions the ancients asked about their past. It simply reduces our analysis to a number of definite themes that aroused constant interest and led tothe formation of stable genres. Thus, a cosmogonic myth answered the questionof the origin of the universe, an etiological myth explained the origin of par-ticular elements of the civilization, say, a craft or a product important in a given

culture, such as beer in Sumer or wine in Greece. A heroic epic and, later, achronicle, told of things of still greater interest: ancestors’ glorious feats.Ancient Greece, whose literary and cultural history begins with Homeric

and Hesiodean epics, manifests the same tendencies. The Iliad tells of the her-oic deeds of the Achaeans and the Trojans, theTheogony, with its peculiar


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Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers24‘genealogical’ attitude, depicts the origin of the world inhabited by gods andmen. But the interest in the past characteristic of the epic is not identical to his-torical interest as such. The first is satisfied with legends about gods and ancientheroes; the second, oriented primarily toward men and their accomplishments,seeks to explain the present by linking it with the past. For all the uniqueness of the Homeric and Hesiodean epics, they have very little about them to suggestthat their authors had a properly historical interest. It is only natural, therefore,that we do not find in either Homer or Hesiod any traces of a tradition on the prō toi heuretai and their inventions.1

The first surviving evidence on the prō toi heuretaiis found in a fragment of Phoronis, an epic poem of the first third of the sixth century.2 It mentions theIdaean Dactyls, mythical creatures named after the mountain range Ida inTroas.3 Originally, the Dactyls were represented as dwarfish smiths, yet in Pho-ronis they take quite a different shape. The author calls them Phrygian sorcerers(góhte~ ^Ida$oi Frúge~ Ándre~), the first to have invented blacksmith’s work(oÏ prõtoi técnhn polum2tio~ ˆHfaístoio e0ron ). Though the question of prō tos heuretē s is in itself new,4 it is applied to the traditional, albeit somewhattransformed material. From the traditional dwarfish blacksmiths, the IdaeanDactyls turn here into Phrygian sorcerers who discovered the art reputed to beunder the patronage of Hephaestus. Later Hephaestus himself will turn frompatron of the blacksmith’s work into its first discoverer, in accordance with thepattern applied to most of the gods. But the author of Phoronis, though wellaware that ironwork constitutes “the art of the wise Hephaestus”, assigns itsdiscovery not to the divine patron, but (using the modern idiom) to foreignspecialists endowed with supernatural qualities. The discovery is thereby trans-ferred from the divine sphere into the human one, unusual as these people ap-pear to be,5 and attributed to the neighbors of the Greeks.

1 On Homer’s and Hesiod’s treatment of differenttécnai and their role in human life,see Erren, M. Die Geschichte der Technik bei Hesiod,Gnomosyne, ed. by G. Kurtz,Munich 1981, 155–166; Schneider,H. Das griechische Technikverständnis, Darm-stadt 1989, 11ff., 31ff.

2 Schol. Apoll. Rhod . I, 1129f. See Kleingünther,op. cit., 26ff.3 For material on the Dactyls, see Hemberg, B. Die Idaiischen Daktylen, Eranos 50

(1952) 41–59.4 Referring to the fragment of Pseudo-HesiodeanOn the Idaean Dactyls(fr. 282 Mer-

kelbach–West), Schneider,op. cit., 46, attributes the tradition of the invention of iron by the Dactyls to Hesiod. Meanwhile, fr.282 merely repeats what is said in Pho-ronis, and the workOn the Idaean Dactylsis a result of ancient philologists’ com-binations: Rzach, A. Hesiod, RE8 (1912) 1223; Schwartz, J. Pseudo-Hesiodea,Leiden 1960, 246f.

5 In Greek mythology, the Dactyls figure along with other fabulous dwarfs, the Cabiriand Telchines, who are also credited with the invention of metalwork (Hemberg, B. Die Kabiren, Uppsala 1950; Dasen, V. Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt and Greece, Oxford1993). Though the tradition of gnome-blacksmiths connected one way or another with Hephaestus is very old, the author of Phoronis has in mind people rather than


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1. Prõtoi eûretaí : gods, heroes, men 25

Interpreting this evidence in the manner of Euhemeristic rationalization of myth, one could find in it a reminiscence of the real history, namely, how ironsmelting, discovered by the Hittites, spread from Asia Minor to Greece. Yet itwould be unfounded to suppose that the author of Phoronis, active in Argos inthe early sixth century, had heard anything of this history or taken interest in it.The early searches for the prō toi heuretai focused, characteristically, not somuch on their identities and historical background as on the technical and cul-tural achievements as such.6 “X discovered y” is a classic formula of heurema-tography, featuring simply the name of the author and, in a very few cases, hisorigin. The time of the discovery is hardly ever recorded, let alone the circum-stances, and the discoverer himself was far from being a real figure. In theheurematographic tradition that comes to us through the catalogues of dis-coveries of the Imperial age,7 god-inventors (Athena, Demeter, Apollo) andcultural heroes (Triptolemus, Palamedes, Daedalus) are virtually matched innumber by the other two major groups: historical personalities (Pheidon, Stesi-chorus, Thales) and Greek or ‘barbarian’ cities and nations.8

That heurematography’s shift from mythography to real events was gradualand remained unfinished is not surprising. Greek historiography, as representedby Hecataeus, Herodotus, and Hellanicus of Lesbos followed the same path. Inthe absence of written evidence and adequate methods for the analysis of sources, heurematography (as well as history) could becomehistorical only byturning to recent or contemporary developments. When trying to ‘reconstruct’the distant past as recorded, if at all, in oral tradition, it resorted to the most fan-

gods, for the gods could hardly be calledgóhte~ ^Ida$oi Frúge~ Ándre~. For moredetail, see Zhmud, L. PRWTOI EURETAI – Götter oder Menschen?, Antike Na-turwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption, Vol. 11 (2001) 9–21.

6 Thraede, K. Erfinder, RLAC 5 (1962) 1192.7 For material on ancient heurematography, see Brusskern, J.C. De rerum inventarum

scriptoribus Graecis, Bonn 1864; Eichholtz, P. De scriptoribus Perì eûrhmátwn(Diss.), Halle 1867; Kremmer, M. De catalogis heurematum (Diss.), Leipzig 1890;Wendling, E. De Peplo Aristotelico(Diss.), Strasbourg 1891; Kleingünther,op. cit.,passim; Kienzle, E. Der Lobpreis von Städten und Ländern in der älteren grie-chischen Dichtung(Diss.), Kallmünz 1936; Thraede. Erfinder, 1191ff.; idem. DasLob des Erfinders. Bemerkungen zur Analyse der Heuremata-Kataloge, RhM 105(1962) 158–186.

8 My calculations, based on the alphabetical index of inventors in Kremmer (op. cit.,113f.), give the following numbers: men – 56; cities and peoples – 43; gods – 33; he-roes – 56. This data is certainly very approximate, because: 1) Kremmer’s catalogueis selective and based mainly on late sources, where many historical figures are lack-ing; 2) I omit almost all names that cannot be related to any group; 3) the gods in-clude Dactyls, Kouretes, Centaurs, Moirae, Cyclops, etc.; 4) the heroes include notonly Roman kings (Numa Pompilius, etc.), but also a great number of etymologicalfictions, such as Iambe, the inventor of iambus; 5) on the other hand, numberedamong the men are such doubtfully historical personalities as Anacharsis and KingMidas, who could not, anyway, count as heroes.


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Chapter 1: In search of the first discoverers26tastic combinations. “The more arbitrary the first suggestion was, the better chances it had to be taken up.”9 Hence, the value of the evidence on the IdaeanDactyls is not that it could (or was meant to) point out the real inventors of theblacksmith’s work. Apart from marking the lower limit of the period when in-terest in prō toi heuretai arose, it contains the germs of two important tenden-cies that were to be developed later. I mean, first, the gradual and incomplete re-placement of gods by semi-divine/heroic figures and next by people, and sec-ond, the Greeks’ proclivity to assign inventions, including their own, to Orien-tal neighbors.

Let me stress again that this was not a linear process; sometimes the changeswere of an alternative character. Depending on the public mood, the peculiar-ities of each particular work, the goals and attitudes of its author, and, last butnot least, the character of the invention itself, different figures came to occupythe foreground.10 A character from an earlier tradition who had receded into thebackground could reappear side by side with ‘new’ inventors. If heurema-tography records, on the whole, hardly more ‘human’ discoveries than those as-signed to gods and heroes, this is rooted in the natural inclination to associatethe beginnings of civilization with divine assistance and in the obscurity andanonymity of the real inventors of old. A tendency, peculiar to the epideictic lit-erature, to honor divine inventors by crediting them with as many discoveries aspossible also has to be taken into account. In the late catalogues of discoveries,it resulted in ascribing the same invention to several gods and heroes, usuallywithout any attempt to reconcile the mutually exclusive versions.11

From the late fifth century on, professional literature dealing first with thehistory of poetry and music and then with that of philosophy, science, andmedicine gradually reduces to a minimum the divine and heroic share in dis-coveries. While the history of music, in particular that of its earlier stages, stillfeatures such names as Orpheus, Musaeus, or Marsyas, the histories of philos-ophy, astronomy, and geometry include only real historical characters. In thisrespect, Peripatetic historiography is more critical than many historical worksof the 17th and even 18th centuries, whose accounts of Greek astronomy startwith Atlas, Uranus, and other mythological figures. Admittedly, in Antiquitythe historicity in the treatment of material depended not so much on when agiven work was written as on its genre. The author of an encomium, a hymn, atragedy or a workOn Discoveries would hardly be seriously concerned with the

9 Thraede. Erfinder, 1207.10 In the course of the sixth–fourth centuries BC, the invention of writing was success-

ively attributed to Cadmus, Danaus, Palamedes, Prometheus, Actaeon, and theEgyptian god Thoth (see e.g. FGrHist 1F20, 10F9, 476 F3). On the ‘secondary sac-ralization’ of the prō toi heuretai, see below, 37.

11 The bulk of the catalogues of discoveries actually derives from the epideictic litera-ture: Thraede. Lob des Erfinders; Cole, T. Democritus and the sources of Greek an-thropology, Ann Arbour 1967, 6f.


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1. Prõtoi eûretaí : gods, heroes, men 27

reliability of the reported information.12 In such genres as doxography or his-tory of science, the writers usually avoided making up obvious inventions of histories, even though they repeated some inventions made by the others.

There is one more reason why the succession ‘gods – heroes – men’ was notstrictly linear. In Homer and Hesiod and, naturally, before them, the Greek godswere represented not as the first discoverers but as the ‘donors of goods’ and asthe patrons of crafts that they hadtaught to men.13 They turn into prō toi heure-taionly after the fame of thehuman inventors had spread throughout the Greekworld. Interest in first discoverers in the absolute sense, i.e., in those who in-vented metallurgy, agriculture, writing, or music, awakens gradually, stimu-lated by growing attention to innovations as such and to the question of priorityin their creation. Though the rapid social and cultural development of Greeceabout 800–600 BC led to a lot of discoveries in all spheres of life, a certainspace of time was needed for specific interest in them to arise and take root. To judge by the available evidence, the real creators of technical and cultural in-novations – inventors, poets, musicians, painters, sculptors – commanded pub-lic attention in the early seventh century.

Revealing in this respect is a fragment of one of the early lyric poets, Alc-man, in which he professes his admiration for his predecessors, who “taughtpeop

zhmud leonid - the origin of science in classical antiquity

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